Tuesday, 6/24/97 Women’s studies course focuses on professions
ACADEMICS: Class traces historical trends, issues of women in
workplaces
By Hannah Miller Summer Bruin Senior Staff In Professor Mary
Niles Maack’s field – librarianship – there appears to be little
bias against women. "The field is 80 percent female," Maack says.
"When I went to find out how women entered the field, I began to
find differences in the literature about professions." Although
educational opportunities exist, the level of success that women
can achieve within the many professions greatly varies, explains
Maack. Fields historically known as professions are those requiring
graduate work and implying a degree of public service. They include
engineering, law, medicine and social science. These fields are to
be the focus of Maack’s new course, titled "Women in the
Professions: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Issues." The
summer-session course "is half academic, half practical," according
to Maack, who formulated the class after doing research into how
professions are defined, and the degree to which they are open to
women. "You have to look at the ethos of a field," Maack said. The
ethos that guides a given profession can be either female-friendly
or male-oriented, Maack explains. ‘High authority’ fields like
clergy, medicine and law, according to feminist writer Judi
Marshall, involve giving directives to clients or performing
services that clients cannot perform themselves. These tend to be
male-dominated when compared to ’empowering professions’ like
social work, counseling or physical therapy. "In empowering
professions, there is an ‘ethic of care,’" Maack explains. "In
social work, for example, the goal is not to have a ‘repeat
client,’ but to teach the client how to effectively deal with the
problem. It’s parallel to the idea of parenting." Empowering
professions tend to be more accessible to women, and some were
created and developed largely by women. "Gender is learned
behavior," Maack says, and for women, that means a focus on
relationships, connectedness and even nurturing behaviors. Those
ethics find their way into the training, goals and the workplaces
of a field. Neomia Lowe, a guest speaker for the class, came up
against gender barriers in the workplace when she entered the field
of aerospace engineering. Only eight percent of U.S. engineers are
women, although the number is steadily increasing. After eight
years of running a 24- hour lab with very little time off, Lowe
quit her job in order to go back to school and start her own
business. "I left because of the inequalities I felt," she says. "I
wasn’t being paid as much as my male-coworkers for the work I was
doing." Lowe’s dilemma is typical of women who become frustrated
with their careers. "I love engineering – I love the work – but I
wasn’t getting what I felt was appropriate compensation," she says.
Unequal pay – although it is has been the focus of feminist
activism for decades – is one of the more evident challenges women
face. They also face a limited scope of positions open to them,
Maack says. For those women who have made inroads into
male-dominated fields, they often find themselves ‘territorially
segregated’ – limited to special niches within a profession. "For
example, many women who go into medicine specialize in general or
family practice, a field which has less prestige that surgery,"
Maack says. Even within the field of librarianship, which is 80
percent female, there is still a prestige barrier. In law
librarianship – which carries a higher level of prestige – only 20
percent. of the librarians are female – although law school
enrollment is 40 percent female. The counterpart to this is
hierarchical segregation, where women are kept at a certain
management level and not encouraged or allowed to rise. "A lot of
women don’t make partner, even though they go to work in these
high-powered law firms," Maack says. In a male-oriented field like
engineering, Lowe experienced this firsthand. "I had wanted to go
into management but after three or four years there, I realized
that it wasn’t going to happen," she says. "I didn’t have access to
the old boys’ network." This happens even in women-dominated
fields, Maack argues, because it is part of gender-role
expectation. "Men tend to be pushed into management, even if they
don’t want to do it," she says. "It’s, ‘you’re a man, don’t you
want to head the library?’" Even when measures like affirmative
action are in place to equalize womens’ opportunities, those who
benefit are often tokenized. While women and minorities benefit
from affirmative action by gaining a place within an organization,
they often are treated differently than other employees when
actually on the job, and expected to ‘speak for’ the group that
they represent, Maack says. "When I was hired, I was the only black
woman working at Rockwell, and only one of four women," Lowe says.
"If it weren’t for affirmative action, I don’t think the company
would have hired me. Most of the women who worked there were
secretaries or lab techs," and not engineers, Lowe said. But in the
end, Lowe said she didn’t want to be too negative in speaking to
women hoping to enter the field. Her advice? "I would say to be …
very realistic," Lowe says. "It is a very hard road, to try to move
up in the field." The class will be offered on Tuesdays and
Thursdays at 2 to 4:30 of Summer Session A, for six weeks. PATRICK
LAM/Daily Bruin Professor Mary Niles Maack is teaching a women’s
studies course this summer investigating the history of gender in
the workplace. Previous Daily Bruin Story Story on gender ratios of
different majors, November 3, 1995 Previous Daily Bruin Stories:
Story on gender ratios of different majors